SACRAMENTO — The surprise decision by Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon to block California’s single-payer health care bill, which the Democrat on Friday called “woefully incomplete,” has so infuriated the California Nurses Association — the bill’s sponsor — that the group has launched an aggressive campaign to pressure him to change his mind.

The speaker says he’s even getting threats of violence online, directed at him and his family — a claim that a union spokesman on Wednesday dismissed as an attempt to distract the public from his actions.

The campaign for universal health care has also adopted some grisly imagery, targeted at Rendon, in recent days. Over the weekend, the head of the nurses’ union, RoseAnn DeMoro, circulated on social media an illustration depicting Rendon stabbing California in the back.

At a Capitol rally on Wednesday, one supporter acted out the meme with a giant fake knife — tinged with a stripe of fake blood, with “Rendon” written on the side of it. The tweeted image was later taken down.

A demonstrator at a Wednesday single-payer health care rally at the Capitol does an enactment of a new internet meme of a California bear being stabbed in the back by Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon, D-Paramount. Rendon on Friday blocked a $400 billion single-payer health care proposal from advancing in the Assembly, saying it was “woefully incomplete” without a funding source. The photo was posted on Twitter and later taken down. (Courtesy Twitter)

Rendon has been defending his decision all week, saying he is a supporter of single-payer health care but that the bill came to the Assembly without key details, such as how the $400 billion plan would be funded. The Senate — which passed the bill by Sens. Ricardo Lara, D-Bell Gardens, and Toni Atkins, D-San Diego, in early June — could bring it back next year, the second year in a two-year session.

In a statement to the Mercury News and East Bay Times, the speaker acknowledged the death threats.

“I’m a grown-up in politics, so those are things I can handle,” he wrote. “What does bother me most are comments like these: `That was our last hope for our uninsurable son who is facing a heart transplant. He will be uninsurable once TrumpCare passes….You just killed my son.’

“It is shameful how the proponents of SB 562 have provided false hope to people who are suffering,” he added, calling the proposal a “shell” of a bill.

But the nurses contend that delaying the bill is inexcusable. They have urged supporters to flood the speaker’s phone lines and social media accounts to criticize his decision not to take up the bill this year.

Some of Rendon’s critics have gone much further.

“I pray someone checks his schedule for baseball practice,” read one ominous Monday post on Twitter in response to Rendon, referencing a shooting this month in Washington that seriously injured House Majority Whip Steve Scalise while the Republican team was practicing for the annual congressional baseball game.

Chuck Idleson, a spokesman for the California Nurses Association, said “obviously, no one that we know was involved” in making any such threats. He dismissed the matter as a “coordinated campaign” by Rendon and his corporate donors to steer media coverage away from the speaker’s decision and its implications for California.

“There are real death threats out there,” he said, “for people who are facing a loss of health care.”

Other labor leaders have called for a truce.

Robbie Hunter, president of the State Building and Construction Trades Council, which represents construction workers in California, released a statement on Wednesday saying:

“Anthony Rendon is an effective leader who comes from a working-class family and who is a defender of labor and working families. The attacks on him by proponents of single-payer healthcare and their allies are unfair, and they ignore his long-established record to expand healthcare access, protect workers’ rights, and advance sustainable environmental policies.

“… We urge the advocates for single payer — the only true reform in health care in the United States that will work — to tone down the rhetoric and move forward with the necessary discussions to advance the goal of universal health care which we all believe in.”

Katy Murphy is based in Sacramento and covers state government for The Mercury News and East Bay Times, a beat she took on in January 2017. Before that, she was the news organization's higher education reporter, writing about UC, CSU, community colleges and private colleges. Long ago, she covered Oakland schools and other K-12 education issues.

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